For The Daily Southerner
TARBORO —
FOR THE DAILY SOUTHERNER
WILSON — “Painting and drawing outdoors opens up the possibility of expressing an immediate present of nature in art. My work focuses on creating interesting compositions by following the landscape‘s lyrical and ever-changing qualities of light and shadows.”
Susan Fecho of Tarboro describes her latest exhibition of work, “Flutterings: Exploration of Nature,” currently on view in the Barton Art Galleries. An opening reception for the exhibition will be Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. with an artist talk scheduled from 3 to 4 p.m. The exhibition will run until Sept. 23.
Fecho, a prominent and award-winning Eastern North Carolina artist, views travel as an invaluable opportunity to expand her education and to bring inspiration to her work. Her wide-ranging art can be categorized in a number of distinct ways – by location for each series, by media, and thematically. Fecho travels to feed her artmaking, to find sources in nature and built environments, to carve out private time to work unhampered by everyday duties and to keep a fresh artist’s outlook.
Her artwork has germinated in her travels throughout three geographies: the Appalachians, the Tidewater region of North Carolina and Newfoundland.
Fecho uses her artist’s sketchbook to record sketched images, and also to put down extensive written notes recording her impressions and ideas for transforming these impressions into the final artwork – a unique and complex layered visual expression. Fecho’s intention includes a reconstruction of each region’s history, making this connection through stories that include the human-built environment – architecture in all its manifestations – within the natural landscape of woodland, farmland, and the community commons.
Her 2010 Newfoundland series was completed during an intensive three-week residency at English Harbour Arts Centre on the Bonavista Peninsula, a windswept coastal artist’s haven isolated from most outside influences. The English Harbour Arts Centre provided the gift of direct nature-perception: immersion in the rocky terrain, a melding of land, sea and mist.
Fecho’s facility and experience in a variety of artmaking methods is a touchstone of her creative production, which shows evidence of skill in drawing, painting, lithography, relief printing, collage and assemblage, bookmaking and computer-based graphic design.
Her use of materials includes ink, watercolor, fabric, plus a diversity of found objects.
This lifelong devotion to art includes over 25 years of teaching and working with art students in the United States and abroad. She has shown her work in 24 solo exhibitions as well as numerous regional, national and international invitationals.
Fecho also has published illustrations, designs and photographs, including seven illustrative artist books such as “Portrait of the Outer Banks: an Artist’s Sketch” in 1996 and “Trunkfull: an Illuminated Year” in 2003.
She currently serves as professor and chair of the Barton College Department of Art. Fecho joined the Barton community in the fall of 1997.
